Sunday, April 19, 2009

Unevolved Factsimians and their Low Fidelity Ears (11.30.12)

Needless to say, I am not impressed with the cognitive firepower of the militant atheist crowd, who strike me as being a few nails shy of a Palestinian ghetto blaster. In fact, in the absence of God, there is no reason to be impressed by anyone or anything, since 1) there is nothing we can know with certainty, 2) loveliness and beauty are simply illusions of the nervous system, and 3) believing untruth is morally indistinguishable from believing truth, since there is no ground for truth or morality anyway.

Cicero wrote that to not know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever. Likewise, the ubiquitous problem with these clever atheists is that they haven't read the minutes of the last philosophical meeting -- or any meetings, for that matter. They actually believe that they are starting their inquiry into existence afresh, with no preconceptions borrowed -- or stolen is more like it -- from religion and metaphysics. They might look clever, but they are actually what I call "factsimians," that is, humans who reduce truth to fact and therefore sink beneath their humanness and try to pull you down with them.

Now, as I mentioned at the top, I am not impressed by the intelligence of the atheists or queeglings, the reason being that intelligence is not intelligent where it "knows" falsehood. Nor am I moved by their arguments, which are necessarily "beneath" the level of that which they are discussing. In other words, we are dealing with the question of "adequation," since the basis of all knowledge is conformity between subject and object (or subject and subject). There are empirical questions for which adequation is not particularly problematic, although there are obviously areas where our senses do deceive us -- for example, the sun does not circle the earth.

Oh, really? True, our naked sense impressions suggest that the earth is the center of the universe and that the sun does indeed circle it. And it is equally true that rational scientific knowledge tells us that the earth actually revolves around the sun. However, if we adopt a post-Einsteinian view, it would be equally accurate to say that both views are correct -- just as it is equally correct to say that the earth "falls" to the apple, or that when we drive someplace, our destination arrives at us.

Thus, the rational (perhaps I should say "rationalistic") view insists that man cannot be not the center of the universe. However, if we transcend 19th century scientific rationalism and consider the "post-rational" metaphysics of quantum cosmology, then we understand that the mystics are correct in their unanimous view that the center of the cosmos is both everywhere and nowhere -- or that the cosmos is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

Philosophically, this is an instance of "returning to the beginning and knowing the joint for the first time," for this premodern view is perfectly in accord with postmodern quantum theory (not that we should ever require science to confirm what amounts to metaphysical common sense, for in the vertical sense, man cannot not be the central axis of manifest existence).

If we wish to approach God -- or, let us just say the Absolute, to avoid saturation -- we can just as well "cut out the middle man" of all of the intervening "-isms" down through the centuries -- empiricism, rationalism, positivism, materialism, Darwinism, what have you -- and use pure metaphysics to arrive at universal theological truths that cannot not be. This is why no discovery of science will ever disprove the existence of God. To the contrary, to the extent that science converges on truth, then it is converging on Truth, which is to say, God. God does not embrace falsehood, whether scientific or religious.

(A point of order: while I believe metaphysics adequately proves the existence of the Absolute, only revelation discloses its nature, which surely makes sense; for example, I can prove that you exist, but I cannot say "what you're like" unless you tell me, or unless I have highly advanced cʘʘnvision -- in which case you are merely "telling things" of which you are not consciously aware. In short, it takes two to Tongan.)

Therefore, whether they care to hear it or not, the scientist's passionate quest for truth is an explicitly religious one, so in any honest debate on the existence of God, God always wins. Of course, sometimes there are dishonest debates, so that it is possible for theists to "win" but for God to lose -- for example, theists win every debate in the Islamic world, thereby defeating God. Likewise, any small victory of Reason in the Islamic world constitutes a rare victory for God in that God-forsaken part of the world.

Now, the fact of the matter is exactly as Schuon says it is: if everyone were capable of understanding metaphysics, there would be no atheists. But they aren't and there are. The problem is that in the present age, with its egalitarian emphasis on "education," many people are educated beyond their intelligence and their actual station. And with no understanding of the vertical, you end up with someone like, say, mtraven, trying to talk about the roof from down in the basement.

But this is what atheists do -- the clever ones, anyway -- for it is what all intellectuals do. Because they are clever, they are very good at understanding and internalizing the fashionable abstractions of the day. As a result, they tend to live in their abstractions, and there is no theory more abstract than atheism, for it superimposes an ultimately sterile dogma over the living mystery (for every real mystery is a sign of divine life) of real being. While this ground of being is a mystery, it is not an absurdity because it is infused with the very same logos that illuminates the mind and allows us to comprehend it. We see beauty or know truth because both are logos calling out to logos.

To paraphrase George Steiner, if all of the religious loans made to science were called in at once, there would be no science left standing -- it would be a catastrophic collapse of the epistemological bubble of scientism, so that countless intellectuals would "lose their life savings." Most notably, science cannot operate without the principles of transcendent truth and the objective mind capable of knowing -- and loving -- it, for truth is not pursued for its own sake, but because it partakes of the beautiful and the good. It is good to know truth, entirely apart from any pragmatic considerations, just as "doing good" is indistinct from "being truth."

Atheism is not just "ignorance of God," but it inevitably redounds to ignorance of everything, since God is the seal of truth. To cite several obvious example, scientific materialism cannot tell us anything about what energy, or life, or consciousness actually are -- but this doesn't mean that these phenomena do not exist or that humans cannot know what they are by other means, for we have reliable testimony that they are three aspects that converge upon the same entity, sat-chit-ananda, or being-consciousness-bliss. You could proclaim this to a scientific audience, but it would have no meaning within the constraints of the abstract paradigm they superimpose upon reality in order to reduce it to scientific understanding -- which is to say, measurable quantities. You could also say that life is to matter as mind is to brain as God is to existence, but it wouldn't mean much to a scientistic atheist.

In his Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver summarizes the situation; I am paraphrasing from memory, but he wrote that without imagination the world is simply a brute fact -- there is nothing to spiritualize it. In the scientistic flight from the cosmic center to the material periphery, one becomes lost in details which cannot be integrated in a holistic way.

This "downward pull" puts an end to ideational life, as the resultant fragmentation leads to an obsession with parts, and with it, an inability to intuit the whole. Hyper-specialization leads to a kind of cognitive deformity, as the world shrinks in proportion to our quantification of it. As a pathetic compensation, modern man is puffed up with the vanity of being able to describe some minute portion of the world, but this is merely postmodern provincialism of the most naive sort. In the end, the separation of knowledge from religion is the separation of facts and knowledge from the metaphysics that explains them and gives them meaning.

Elsewhere Weaver observed (it is possbible that these are my own notes, not his exact words) that “Truth is an antecedent reality perceived by the intellect and not the senses," and that "immersion in matter makes man unfit to deal with the problems of matter. Facts are substituted for truth, but there is no knowledge at the level of sensation. Facts do not speak for themselves and experience cannot tell us what we are experiencing. The world is our primary datum, but we do not end our days with a wealth of sense impressions.”

But this is how science -- which should be the pursuit of universal truth -- evolves into metaphysical scientism, which denies universals transcending experience, and therefore ends in bonehead relativism. Put another way, science reduces the world to a coherent absurdity, while metaphysics elevates it to a coherent non-absurdity. And there is no reason to take anyone seriously who believes existence to be absurd, since anything they can say will be equally absurd. And no one is more proudly absurd than the atheist.

Now, one of the reasons it is pointless to debate the existence of God is that higher realties do not stand out except to those who stand in them. Perhaps an analogy will be helpful. I subscribe to Stereophile magazine, which is the Bible of high-end audio. Some of the equipment they review is insanely expensive, and there is a never-ending debate in the audio community between the "ears" and the "engineers" as to whether the sonic differences detected by the reviewers actually exist.

For example, the official view of a rag such as Consumer Reports is that there is no discernible difference in sound quality between a cheap CD player and an expensive one. Rather, the only issue that counts are price and reliability. Otherwise you're just wasting your money. Not only that, but you're probably either a fool or a mystagogue -- just like someone who believes in God without any empirical evidence.

In many ways, a debate between atheists and theists is between the ears and engineers. Regarding the audio debate, the engineers imagine that there must be some kind of formal test or instrument that can objectively measure and quantify the supposed musical differences. However, as John Atkinson notes in the latest issue, "the very act of such testing appears to minimize the listener's detection of things that can be disturbingly audible under more relaxed conditions." In other words, "too often it is as if the listener is being asked to distinguish between subtle color casts on photographic prints while a bright light is shone in his eyes."

You could set up a double blind study, and rapidly shift back and forth between one sound system and another, but this hasn't the slightest relevance, because this is not the way we listen to music. While you might be able to detect sonic differences between the two, you would probably not be able to detect musical differences -- and those are the only ones that matter. To really tell the difference, you must immerse yourself in musical experience, which means "spending ample time engrossed in music that stirs [your] soul."

Since I know a little bit about audio and most people know nothing, friends will occasionally ask me for recommendations when they want to purchase a component. But I can no more answer this question than if someone were to ask, "how should I pursue religion? I don't want to waste time looking for God. Just tell me where he is, so I can get on with it."

But just as you can have sound with no musicality, you can have religion with no God. The other day I did an audio comparison between the new CD reissue of the American version of Rubber Soul and my audiophile vinyl pressing. But there was "no comparison." While the CD sounds very good, the vinyl just came alive. It did something to me, something tangibly real but undoubtedly immeasurable. There was an additional dimension that I am quite sure no scientific instrument would ever be able to detect. For it was a vivid quality of "life" or "presence" that I felt in my rubbery soul, not in my concrete ears.

Atheists try to listen for God with their scientific instruments, when He can only be heard with discerning ears.

Here's another little hint: if you're working on your house, you've already transcended it, which is why if you can explain Darwinism, it can't explain you -- and conversely, why, if you could understand God, he would not exist. Thus, only atheists truly understand God.

29 comments:

Heh, I was thinking yesterday about the "effect" that HvB produces as you review his works, and I think it is a classic case of "getting on with it," in a good way.Anymore, most other reflections suffer by comparison. (Not that we need compare.)

Great post, Bob.A debate-ender.It seems to make sense that we should discover vinyl before the CD. Maybe Schuon knows what I mean.Or at least, that we are so fortunate to have discovered it when we did.

“…we understand that the mystics are correct in their unanimous view that the center of the cosmos is both everywhere and nowhere…”

Was reminded somehow and for some reason earlier in the week that the name of the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” was a gift. Telling us the name way at the beginning of the book or “in the beginning” (take your pick) was a gift. And if these speakers or writers, whoever they were, were just ordinary people of their age (pick 5,000 years ago if you like), how did they get so smart, why so smart, and why is what they said way back then still true today, if not more so today.

Scientist: "Well God, we've come to a point where you are no longer needed. Science has finally figured out a way to create life out of nothing. In other words, we can now do what you did in the ‘beginning.’

God: "Is that so? Tell me."

Scientist: "And not only that, we can take dirt and form it into the likeness of You and breathe life into it, thus creating man.”

God: "Well, that's interesting, show me."

Scientist: "Yes, watch this." (Scientist scoops up a handful of soil and begins forming it into a shape to begin the process of imbuing it with life)

Speaking of ears, in the back pages of Stereophile, they used to carry an advertisement for a ridiculous looking giant pair of leather ears, which you would slip over your own ears during a "listening session," as they would supposedly cause a dramatic improvement in the musical fidelity of your sound system.

I have an atheist friend who's main compliant is that she doesn't like the sense of being supervised or watched over by a higher power. Her parents were and are very intrusive and that could explain her aversion.

She gets enraged when she detects she's being meddled with by God. She is afflicted by unlikely coincidences and the like and is increasingly bitter that she can't seem to escape this effect. She used to play the lotto but doesn't anymore as she thinks its being controlled and is not truly random.

There's my two cents on atheists; the motivation in this case I found interesting.

Vinyl on proper equipment is undeniably better than the CD -- and immeasurably better than the abhorrent MP3 (which is the only format most young people today will ever know in their formative years).

SACD and DVD Audio are another matter. These formats are 65,536 times as finely grained as the lumbering 16 bit CD. The coarse-grained CD format explains why listening to music on one is similar to viewing a vista through a screen door. Vinyl -- and arguably the 32-bit formats like SACD -- are like opening the door.

My experience with atheists (including listening to Christopher Hitchens) is that they are primarily hung up on the so-called "problem of evil". Why would a loving God allow my geraniums to wilt yadda yadda.

I need to go back to harvesting answers from the Arkive, but I'd be grateful if anyone here has a reasonably succinct coonish take on this matter (something which can resonate at least somewhat with the atheist who essentially just "goes with the flow and has never been exposed to reflective explanations of this and similar problems).

"Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility -- and necessity -- of evil; seen from this angle, what we term evil is thus indirectly a result of Infinitude, hence of the Divine Nature; in this respect, God cannot wish to suppress it; likewise, in this respect -- and only in this respect -- evil ceases to be evil, being no more than an indirect and distant manifestation of a mysterious aspect of the Divine Nature, precisely that of Infinitude or of All-Possibility. One could also say that Infinitude engenders Possibility, and Possibility engenders Relativity; now Relativity contains by definition what we could term the principle of contrast. Insofar as a quality is relative -- or is reflected in Relativity -- it has ontological need of a contrast, not intrinsically or in virtue of its content, but extrinsically and in virtue of its mode, thus because of its contingency. Indeed, it is the relative or contingent character of a quality that requires or brings about the existence of the corresponding privative manifestation, with all its possible gradations and as a result, its defect, vice, evil. Evil is the possibility of the impossible, since relative good is the Possible approaching impossibility; for it is from this paradoxical combination of Possibility with impossibility -- impossibility becoming real only in and through Possibility -- that Contingency or Relativity originates, if one may be allowed an ellipsis that is complex and daring, but difficult to avoid at this point."

Thanks Bob. That was a much-needed refresher. Gotta spread the coon perspective, and telling people to read through several hundred blog posts usually doesn't go over so well. These distillations are very useful. If even one atheist begins to question his assumptions...

...went digging into my Catechism after leaving my last comment. Found this:

"Where does evil come from? "I sought whence evil comes and there was no solution," said St. Augustine, and his own painful quest would only be resolved by his conversion to the living God. For "the mystery of lawlessness" is clarified only in the light of the "mystery of our religion". The revelation of divine love in Christ manifested at the same time the extent of evil and the superabundance of grace. We must therefore approach the question of the origin of evil by fixing our eyes of our faith on him who alone is its conqueror."

I would venture to say that an atheist who refuses to fix his/her eyes on God -- that is the Good, the True and the Beautiful -- could not understand the nature or reality of evil, that is, the problem of evil.

Correct. If you cannot posit the absolute, the relative is reduced to absurdity. This is why, as Dennis Prager always emphasizes, one of the defining characteristics of the left is its naivete about evil. And also why, in failing to comprehend evil, the left inevitably elevates the non-evil to evil. e.g., harsh interrogation of known terrorists = US is a terror state, or, in the case of Queeg, ID = Islamism.

"As a pathetic compensation, modern man is puffed up with the vanity of being able to describe some minute portion of the world, but this is merely postmodern provincialism of the most naive sort. In the end, the separation of knowledge from religion is the separation of facts and knowledge from the metaphysics that explains them and gives them meaning."

Ho.

"“Truth is an antecedent reality perceived by the intellect and not the senses," and that "immersion in matter makes man unfit to deal with the problems of matter. Facts are substituted for truth, but there is no knowledge at the level of sensation. Facts do not speak for themselves and experience cannot tell us what we are experiencing. The world is our primary datum, but we do not end our days with a wealth of sense impressions.”

For example, see mtcraven's comment yesterday “My technique has been to try to highlight internal contradictions, since a contradiction is an error no matter what your premises are”... hard to wrap the mind around the absurd stupidity of that, which is only made possible by substituting facts for Truth... only on a flattened anti-conceptual plane, can somebody expect to perceive contradictions without regard to premises.

To throw my two cents in, in proposing a world that has no evil, they must at the same stroke be proposing a world where a person couldn't possibly choose to do good either... or even choose at all.

To propose a world where evil is not possible, is a world where a person cannot possibly make a choice between doing what is Good, mediocre or evil... absurd to say that man has free will choose between A, A, A or A.

In such a world, their ideal world - never forget that - there would be no free will, no excellence, no Good, and necessarily no Beauty. The only way they can even propose such an absurdity, is to believe that there is no such thing as Free Will, that there is no such thing as a structured hierarchy of Truth, such a world can only be a pinball machine of outcomes, which some few expert elites will be in a position to press the flippers in order to bounce the people through to attain some ends... which are no better than some other ends... all are equal, all are equally grey, and all are ultimately lifeless.

On a differnt note. 20 million years ago I had almost $200, maybe $300 to blow on a set of stereo speakers. I spent weeks in the store listening over and over to what the had. Finally I made my choice, "Advent" speakers.

"Are you crazy"? the guy said Boise (sp? Bose?) are the best (at that time everybody was all about Boise. )

I hated Boise speakers. They had this horrible base thump that sounded totally unnatual to me. I loved my Advents for years even when compared to "better speakers". Then one day while I was out some idiot decided to see just how loud they could play. He may not be da** to hell for that but, if I have anything to say, he's spending a couple of tough weeks in purgetory

"Now, as I mentioned at the top, I am not impressed by the intelligence of the atheists or queeglings, the reason being that intelligence is not intelligent where it "knows" falsehood."

Not true. Find an intelligent person who didn't know falsehoods of any kind(but everybody knows falsehoods, we've all experienced and told lies). But even then, Richard Dawkins, a fairly militant atheist as I'm sure you view him, acknowledges there is no such thing as absolute certainty.

But there is certainty in believing only what your senses directly tell you. You can't even always trust them, but reality is what you perceive it. If atheists get by without God (and they do) then atheists have nothing to prove, everybody else can see what they believe in. There is no need to prove you believe in something everybody else can sense without guidance. An atheist has no need to defend their stance. If you find it offensive you can't convince them there is a god, then that isn't their problem, it's yours. To them there is no consequence for not believing in your God, especially when you can't do so convincingly.

Bob you are absolutely terrible at understanding the position of the other side. It seems you're practically begging to bring out the trolls. Well, I'd say this is the first time I've been able to say that the biggest troll on a blog is the blogger himself. What else would you call somebody who is so intent on bringing out uneccessary conflict by intentionally misrepresenting the positions of others, thus evoking a necessary reaction, and an overreaction on the part of the local community.

Remember how much of a conflict it became when somebody merely pointed out that men are apes? This is why I only visit this blog once a month or so, there is only so much unfettered anger one can deal with, and this community certainly has little control of their hatred for atheists. And yet the atheists are the ones with anger issues.

Certainly they should be angry, look at the crap they get just for their beliefs. It's just like it was for the Christians in Rome, or the Irish and women in the early 20th Century, or the Blacks in the mid 20th Century. The only reason it's a major conflict today, is because there are people who just refuse to let it be a legitimate belief. You can't get an atheist and a believer in the same room without arguing about why they're right, but since neither has enough compelling evidence to be gnostic, but are on equal footing.

On 4/20/08 at 07:47:00 AM: Anonymous said... Remember how much of a conflict it became when somebody merely pointed out that men are apes? This is why I only visit this blog once a month or so, there is only so much unfettered anger one can deal with, and this community certainly has little control of their hatred for atheists. And yet the atheists are the ones with anger issues.

Certainly they should be angry, look at the crap they get just for their beliefs. It's just like it was for the Christians in Rome, or the Irish and women in the early 20th Century, or the Blacks in the mid 20th Century.

Is this not truly breathtaking self pity! After the horrors of the 20th Century! Millions of Jews, tens and tens and tens and tens and tens of millions of Buddhists and Christians and their children enslaved, robbed, imprisoned, tortured and murdered by militant anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-religious totalitarian atheists! And Anonymous feels threatened because people of faith will not quietly vacate the “public square”!

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Who spirals down the celestial firepole on wings of slack, seizes the wheel of the cosmic bus, and embarks upin a bewilderness adventure of higher nondoodling? Who, haloed be his gnome, loiters on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway, looking for handouts from Petey? Who, with his doppelgägster and testy snideprick, Cousin Dupree, wields the pliers and blowtorch of fine insultainment for the ridicure of assouls? Who is the gentleman loaffeur who yoinks the sword from the stoned philosopher and shoves it in the breadbasket of metaphysical ignorance and tenure? Whose New Testavus for the Restavus blows the locked doors of the empyrean off their rusty old hinges and sheds a beam of intense darkness on the world enigma? Who is the Biggest Fakir of the Vertical Church of God Knows What, channeling the roaring torrent of 〇 into the feeble stream of cyberspace? Who is the masked pandit who lobs the first water balloon out the motel window at the annual Raccoon convention? Who is your nonlocal partner in disorganized crimethink? Shut your mouth! But I'm talkin' about bʘb! Then we can dig it!

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